Chapter 10
NIKITA
The club has no name on the door, only a brass plate worn smooth by people who already know where they are.
Platon cleared the guest list two days ago and found Vogt’s name on it under a Geneva shell, which is the only reason Piper and I are climbing these stairs in borrowed evening clothes with the cigarette case in my pocket.
We recovered the case from a Gideon courier three nights ago, before it reached the viewing.
Platon’s people took it off him in a Newark loading bay with a clipboard and a forged customs hold, no weapons drawn, and Vogt was told only that the piece was delayed in transit.
He still believes it’s coming, and the widow controls whether it sells.
That is the whole plan. A broker who thinks he’s about to close on a marked Rusakov piece will talk to the widow selling it, and a talking broker leads us up his own chain toward Shilov.
Piper walks half a step ahead of me through the entry, and the room accepts her without a flicker.
That’s the part I didn’t prepare for. She wears the widow like it was tailored for her, and the men at the low tables track her across the floor and read her as Rusakov money: recently bereaved and unattached.
She belongs here, and I no longer do. I built rooms like this.
I owned three of them once. Now I stand at her shoulder in a well-cut jacket and play the discreet associate, close enough to guard her and forbidden from claiming her, because a dead man can’t put his hand on his own wife in a room full of people who’d sell that information to Rahil by morning.
“Stop glaring at the room,” Piper says without turning her head. “You look like security. Widows don’t travel with security that glares.”
“I look like an associate.”
“You look like a man deciding who to hurt first.” She lifts a champagne flute off a passing tray and doesn’t drink it. “Go be bored somewhere I can see you. Let me work.”
I go, because she’s correct, and arguing would only prove her point.
Across the room, Platon has taken a position near the service corridor with a drink he won’t touch, subtly watching the exits.
Maren works the far end of the bar in a green dress she bought for the job and keeps complaining about, her resale credentials real enough to open conversations Piper can’t risk.
She’s already three names deep with a Belgian dealer, and every few minutes, she drifts back toward Platon and passes him something between sips without looking at him.
“You’re standing like a bodyguard,” she says under the music, setting down her glass.
“I’m a bodyguard.”
“You’re supposed to be my plus-one. Try to look like you’ve enjoyed a single thing in your life.” She’s gone before he answers, which he wasn’t going to, and he watches her go for exactly one second longer than a man mapping exits would, then catches me watching him do it and returns to the exits.
Piper and I exchange a glance, hearing every word of their exchange through our earpieces.
The room does what rooms like this always do.
A woman two tables over describes the Klimt her grandfather took out of Vienna in 1938 like she’s recounting a family recipe, and the man beside her nods along.
Neither of them uses the word stolen because in here, the word doesn’t exist. There’s a Scythian gold piece under glass by the coat room that someone walked out of a museum in Kyiv four years ago and will never walk back.
Everyone drinks champagne and calls the origins of stolen objects provenance.
I spent twenty years in rooms like this and I only see it clearly now, standing in one as a ghost, watching Piper move through it as though she was born to the fraud, which, considering the education Dorian gave her, she was.
No one here looks at me twice, and that was always the plan.
I ran the Rusakov family for a decade without letting a single photograph exist, so the men in this room register a broad man in an expensive jacket and nothing more.
Vogt does business through screens and intermediaries.
He never met me, which is the only reason I can stand this close to his table.
I catch Maren’s eye once as she leans past Platon to set down her glass.
She glances from me to Piper and back, one eyebrow going up, and the meaning is plain enough without words.
Piper hasn’t broken character once tonight.
I’ve broken mine three separate times, every one of them when a man’s gaze stayed on her a beat too long.
Vogt finds us in under twenty minutes. He’s smaller than his reputation, silver at the temples, and his handshake is soft. I doubt he has ever carried anything heavier than a contract.
“Mrs. Rusakov.” He says the name like he’s tasting it. “I confess I didn’t expect to meet you in person. Your husband’s collection has been something of a ghost story in my circles for years.”
“My husband liked ghosts better than guests.” Piper gives him the widow’s cool half-smile. “You’re the man who’s been buying pieces of him.”
“I appreciate good provenance.” Vogt’s gaze moves to me, dismisses me as furniture, and returns to her. “Yours is remarkable. Voss. I knew a Voss once, professionally. Dorian. Are you a relation?”
Piper becomes still beside me, one heartbeat of stillness she covers before anyone but me could catch it.
“My father,” she says coolly. “He passed some years ago.”
“My condolences. He was an artist.” Vogt lifts his glass a fraction in a toast to a dead man he’s about to insult with praise.
“The Rembrandt provenance he built for the Antwerp consignment in 2016 is still, to my knowledge, undetected. Shilov’s people still speak of it with a reverence that borders on fear.
Your father understood that a document only has to survive the one person who bothers to check it. ”
Piper’s right eyelid twitches. A year, a city, a specific job, handed to her across a champagne flute by a broker who knew a piece of her father she apparently didn’t.
Her face stays composed, but her eyes narrow by a fraction as she fits the new fact into the history she thought she’d finished sorting.
Only the eyes give her away, and only to me.
“He rarely discussed his work,” she says. Her voice holds.
“Discretion is inherited, then.” Vogt’s attention sharpens. “Which brings me to why I hoped to meet you. I understand a certain silver cigarette case has come back into circulation. Rusakov-marked. I have a client with a long memory and a longer reach who would pay generously to complete a set.”
This is the moment we came for. Piper reaches into my jacket, and I let her, her fingers sliding against my chest in a move the room reads as intimate.
She draws the case out slowly, and the drag of her hand as it leaves goes through me sharper than it has any right to.
She sets the case on the high table between them, and the wolf’s head catches the light.
Vogt’s hand comes down over hers before she’s fully released it, his fingers closing on her wrist to turn the case toward the light.
He touches her for one second.
I move before I decide to. I step in and spread my hand against the small of Piper’s back, and I angle my body between her and Vogt in a way no associate would, looking at the place where his fingers rest on her wrist until he takes them off it.
The temperature of the whole exchange drops.
Vogt’s smile doesn’t move, but his eyes do, flicking from her wrist to my hand on her back to my face, noting I’ve just revealed more than I should have.
With luck, he assumes I’m the widow’s possessive new lover and nothing more.
“The case stays with Mrs. Rusakov until terms are agreed,” I say. “You’ll deal through her, not around her.”
“Of course.” Vogt withdraws with a small bow that has an edge under it.
“Forgive me. I meant no discourtesy to the lady, or to whoever she travels with.” He sets a card on the table beside the case.
“My client is patient, Mrs. Rusakov. When you tire of intermediaries who forget their place, call the number.”
He’s gone into the crowd before I can decide whether to follow. Across the room, Platon has stiffened, watching me with faint alarm. He saw all of it. I put my hand on a woman I’m not supposed to own in front of the exact person we needed to fool, and I did it without a second’s thought.
Platon doesn’t come over. He doesn’t have to. He warned me about this, and he won’t waste a look reminding me he was right. He’ll find a way to mention it later, and I’ll deserve it.
Piper picks up the case, pockets Vogt’s card, and walks toward the back of the club without a word to me. Which is how I know how badly I’ve done.
The locked office behind the club belongs to a contact who owes Platon a favor and knows better than to ask why we need a room. Piper is inside it when I close the door, standing with her back to me, gripping the edge of the desk.
“You want to tell me what that was?” She sounds pissed.
“He had his hand on you.”
“He had his hand on my wrist for one second, in a room where I was following the plan.” When she turns around, the widow is gone, and the woman underneath is furious in a way the widow never gets to be.
“You stepped in like a jealous husband, which is a problem, Nikita, because you’re supposed to be dead.
Dead men don’t glare at brokers who touch their wives.
You handed Vogt the one thing we came here to hide, that somebody in this room cares whether I get touched, and now he’s going to spend the drive back to wherever he sleeps wondering who. ”
“He’s more likely to assume I’m your lover than your husband, back from the dead.” I don’t let her express her clear doubt. “I know what I did.”
“Then why did you do it?”